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Throughout life, everyone is forced to encounter obstacles that may seem impossible to overcome


Morganh 2 / 3  
Nov 4, 2014   #1
The prompt is as follows:
Describe a circumstance, obstacle, or conflict in your life, and the skills and resources you used to resolve it. Did it change you? If so, how?

and here is what I wrote:

"Morgan, you're honestly so lucky" Bailey said to me as she was packing to visit her dad's house. She and our other cousin, Austin, had both been products of divorced parents; I saw them every summer, when I visited Washington. Since they are my best friends, they always made sure to tell me how lucky I was to be a product of a happy family where my parents almost never argued. The entirety of my family expected that it would eternally remain this way with no real scares of divorce or separation.

When I was nearly fifteen, the atmosphere in my household rapidly started to deteriorate. One minute my parents were a happy couple and the next, I was living in fear that I would soon be forced to decide which parent I wanted to live with. My parents started verbally tearing each other apart and fighting endlessly over pathetic and meaningless details. They fought over money since our financial situation at the time was complicated due to the company my dad worked for shutting down. They fought over how much time my dad was spending on his computer rather than with the family. They even fought about how they were constantly fighting. They tried not to argue in front of me, but at times they just couldn't control themselves.

"I just wish you would pay more attention to what's going on around you." My mother began. "You're not emotionally here anymore because you're always on your computer".

"Just because I'm working, Andrea, doesn't mean that I am emotionally absent" my dad's voice rose. This argument particularly annoyed me due to the fact that I had been watching America's Got Talent, until they rudely interrupted.

"God, you just pick. That's all you do. You try and start these fights with me and I'm so tired of it. You're just trying to make me out to be the bad guy". My dad's voice went up a notch. I cranked the volume on the TV hoping that they would get my message. They didn't. I turned off the TV in defeat and locked myself in my bedroom for the rest of the night with my dog in attempt to escape their childish demeanor.

At times, my relationship with each of them individually, fluctuated between positive and negative. My mom and I would be sharing a laugh about celebrity gossip and then the conversation would take a misguided turn to her throwing low blows at my dad: a simple "well you're father is clueless, he needs to take responsibility for his part in this relationship." When this happened, I would emotionally shut down because I hated more than anything that this poisonous atmosphere had become my reality. I never wanted to be involved in their crumbling relationship because I feared that I would go down with it. The idea that this would be my life until I graduated repulsed me. I had no way to escape.

Then one morning, my mother came into my room and announced with a quivering lip and tears streaming down her face, that she would be house hunting for a place of her own. When my dad realized that she was serious about ending their 18 year marriage, he proposed a verbal contract to renew the happiness and well-being of the family and of their marriage.

The atmosphere started to gradually improve as we tried to bring the family back together again. We started to eat every meal together and say a blessing each time we ate. We also had a family game night on Fridays to help us unwind from the stress of work and school. This, in my opinion, was a huge contribution in repairing our relationship because it allowed us to open up to each other and laugh together without worrying about an argument breaking out. Playing games helped to form patience and communication skills that play a major role in our family to this day where we are able to thoroughly process our thoughts before they are verbally expressed.

This experience taught me that if you stop telling the people you love them how much you appreciate them, the relationship can come unglued very quickly and that it's a very difficult and timely process to gather the pieces and put them together again. Even though it took a freighting, emotional experience like this, my family and I grew so much stronger than before. As an only child, I have relied on my parents to be the ones to teach me how to be a proper, educated, young woman. Even more crucially, they taught me how to tell left from right, right from wrong, and how important it is to never give up on love.
vangiespen - / 4,134 1449  
Nov 4, 2014   #2
Morgan, the story of your dog's battle with Lyme disease is a very touching human interest story that will tug t the heart of any pet lover. However, it does not apply to this essay prompt mainly because you were not personally involved in the treatment of the dog. As the instruction states, you need to provide an event in your life that forced you to overcome an obstacle using your personal qualities in terms of skills and resources. In this case, going from vet to vet and administering medication is not the same. In more ways than one, this is a shallow essay that uses a touching event to show that you will use other people's skills and resources to solve a problem rather than your own. The essay is trying to get you to talk about your problem solving skills in relation to your own complicated issues. So try to pick an event from your life that actually forced you to develop your problem solving skill and discuss that. Again, this essay is a very nice essay, it just does not provide the kind of answer that the prompts requires you to present, which is why it needs to be changed :-)
OP Morganh 2 / 3  
Nov 4, 2014   #3
Okay I redid it with a new topic, but i'm afraid the topic is too boring or cliche... but I really don't know any other way I could do this essay.

Throughout life, everyone is forced to encounter obstacles that may seem impossible to overcome, but it's how we handle these hardships that define us.

At a young age, my cousins who I grew up with always told me how lucky I was to be a product of a very happy, healthy family where my parents almost never fought. I knew I was lucky that my parents were still happily married, as many parents of my friends and family were separated by divorce or living in pure unhappiness. I really thought it would remain this way my whole life with no real scares of divorce or separation. As an only child, I rely on my parents to be the ones to teach me how to be a proper, educated, young woman. They taught me right from wrong, left from right, how to move past a difficult situation, how to love, and more; they have been my most important teachers throughout my whole life.

[...]
vangiespen - / 4,134 1449  
Nov 5, 2014   #4
Morgan, on the contrary, this essay is not a cliche because it did not end in the divorce of your parents. Instead, it showed the resiliency of your relationship as a family and offered us an insight into the lessons that you learned during this tumultuous time in your life. I would advice that you shorten your introduction though. You have spent too much time introducing the topic and not enough time on developing the paragraph about the lessons that you learned from the experience. You should work more on developing those lessons on a per paragraph basis in order to better answer the prompt. Once you have completed those changes, we can work on fixing the grammatical problems that exist in the essay :-)


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